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CHAPTER 1
"The First Girls' Debating Club": Creating a Legacy at Oberlin College, 1835–1935
The first college women's debating society in the United States developed in the context of a grand nineteenth-century experiment. In 1833, it was "generally frowned upon" for institutions of higher learning to admit students of color, and a "somewhat shocking departure" to admit women students, yet in Oberlin, Ohio, the founders of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute did both. Oberlin's women students then set themselves apart by pursuing spaces for the sustained practice of argumentation and debate. Brief accounts of Oberlin's pioneer debating society circulate in a variety of academic texts, including feminist anthologies, public address textbooks, rhetoric and composition histories, and feminist rhetorical scholarship, as well as in books aimed at a more popular readership, such as biographies, twentieth-century power feminist bestsellers, and historical romance novels. Each iteration of the Oberlin case provides a tantalizing tidbit that anchors broader discussions about nineteenth-century gender politics, especially prohibitions against women's speech.
The honor of the first women's debating society is at times bestowed upon Oberlin's Young Ladies' Association, an institutionally authorized organization founded in 1835. Open to all of Oberlin's women students, the Young Ladies' Association formed to aid the intellectual growth of its students beyond the classroom, primarily in matters of literature and religion. The group later changed its name to the Young Ladies' Literary Society, and then to the Ladies' Literary Society. The term "ladies" gradually fell out of fashion for Oberlin students, as it did with many U.S. women's clubs. Postbellum debaters reportedly wanted this change because they saw "ladies" as antiquated and thus more accurate for the generations that had come before than for the new woman of the late nineteenth century. In 1878, they agreed to change the name again to become known as the LLS: an acronym standing not for Ladies' Literary Society, as one might presume, but for an adopted motto, Litterae Laborum Solomen (translated as "literature is comfort from troubles"). As members graduated and moved on, the LLS became a storied institution in its own right. At various points, members, alumnae, and admirers repeated with pride the tenuous claim that the LLS was the first ever women's society, full stop. They gradually revised that claim to call it either the first college women's society or the "first women's debate society in the country." Celebration of the society reached its pinnacle in 1935, when generations of LLS members returned to Oberlin's campus for the club's centennial jubilee.
However, this is just one version of the origin story. A more popular rendering focuses on a different debating club — one in which brave and persistent women traveled to new, precarious spaces for argument. In this version of the story, Oberlin's women students were told that they could be audience members but could not take part as speakers in classroom debates. Frustrated with this injustice in coeducation, Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown (later known as Antoinette Brown Blackwell) pushed beyond authorized spaces, risking discipline and impropriety to form a secret debating society in the woods behind the college. More detailed accounts of this story report that in the colder months, Stone and Brown's debating club met in the house of a black woman who lived in the town. The secret debating society was called "the first debating club ever formed among college girls." Thus, the LLS and the secret debating society in the woods have been fused and confused in scholarly and popular memory. This is done in error, for among other inconsistencies, Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown did not come to Oberlin until 1843 and 1846, respectively. This would have been eight and eleven years after the first meeting of the Young Ladies' Association (Brown would have been ten years old at that time).
There are several reasons why this conflation may have happened. First, Stone and Brown were both members of the LLS when their secret debating society in the woods was founded. Second, though the LLS is often called a debating society, it is a matter of dispute as to whether the activities of the society required women to participate in written or oral argumentation. The very idea that Stone, Brown, and others would seek refuge in their secret debating society suggests that the LLS was not providing the training in oratory that they desired for their post-Oberlin careers. Stone and Brown kindled a lifelong friendship during their time at Oberlin but are better known for their later careers: Stone became a renowned lecturer, abolitionist, and suffragist, and Brown was a pioneering woman minister, reformer, and author.
Though the story of this early debating society is in wide circulation, previous accounts do not attempt to reconcile the competing versions of the origin story, nor do they account for how Oberlin's women debaters have been remembered beyond that initial period of clandestine debating. Rather than focusing on one club or the other, we must widen our scope to understand debating women at Oberlin over the 100-year period between 1835 (the year the Young Ladies' Association was created) and 1935 (the year the centennial jubilee was held). I do this by offering a close reading of archival materials, including society minutes, correspondence, and various published narratives from members, alumnae, and scholars. I begin with the story of the sanctioned and secret societies, exploring details generally omitted in the more widely circulated anecdotes, and then move beyond these origin stories to examine the interplay of history and memory in the activities of subsequent generations of LLS members. Crucial to Oberlin's argument culture, I argue, were two prevailing themes: the importance of securing spaces for argument, and the sense of belonging fostered when debating women reflected on their legacies as members of the society by imagining the debaters who had come before and would come after them.
Gender, Race, and Degrees of Publicity
Oberlin was established as a colony and a college imbued with Christian principles. The Oberlin Collegiate Institute differed from other institutions of higher learning in the 1830s due to its unique admission policies, dedication to manual labor, rootedness in the religious reform tradition, and moral stance on slavery. It was not a school for the elite. Faculty and students alike lived and ate simply. Their daily routines included studying, praying, and working. Meals in the boarding hall consisted of Graham brown bread, milk, and vegetables such as the shelled corn grown on the campus. The majority of early attendees were the children of poor farmers from New England and Ohio who were galvanized by the knowledge that Oberlin's motto of "learning and labor" meant that they could pay their educational expenses by completing a daily schedule of farm and domestic tasks.
Oberlin students had to possess good moral and intellectual character, be willing to perform manual labor, and abide by the rules of the university, which included regular public prayer and the complete avoidance of alcohol and gambling. There was no formal admissions process; potential students sent letters making the case for their eligibility or had friends and family members testify on their behalf. For example, when Silas R. Badeau wrote to Oberlin requesting admission for his daughter, he marshaled many of the themes that defined the College at the time, explaining: "we are unable to sustain her at any but a Manual Labour Institution. And though away from Parents, she will be surrounded by religious influence instead of worldly. And again we sympathize with the Oppressed and those who have no comforter, and we wish our Child to be with those who do so preeminently, manifesting it by their works." This final comment was a reference to Oberlin's commitment to abolitionism. The institution is rightly revered as a leader in nineteenth-century interracial education, although the decision to play that role was not as unanimous or straightforward as it may seem. According to former Oberlin archivist Roland Baumann, it was a "combination of financial need, chance opportunity, and the colonists' religious sense of obligation" that ultimately propelled Oberlin toward admitting people of color. After much contentious debate, in 1835 the Oberlin trustees approved a resolution that "the education of people of color is a matter of great interest and should be encouraged & sustained in this Institution." Thereafter, black men were admitted, and black women were admitted in the 1840s. Oberlin received many inquiries as word about their fair treatment at the college spread. Though African American students made up only a small percentage of the total student body during the antebellum period, Oberlin's admissions policy was progressive compared to other U.S. colleges at the time.
Progressive gender ideology, however, was not the primary inspiration for the admission of women students. Although the college professed a desire to "brin[g] within the reach of the misjudged and neglected sex, all the instructive privileges which hitherto have unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs," those expecting gender equality would have been sorely disappointed. As Lori D. Ginzburg reminds us, Oberlin's dedication to coeducation was motivated out of an evangelical reform ideology that connected feminine virtues and Christian virtues. As such, the goal was never equality of the sexes; it was to enable the piety, submission, and quiet grace attributed to women to remedy the excesses of a "male sphere" gone awry.Women students at the college could anticipate "washing the men's clothing, caring for their rooms, serving them at table, listening to their orations, but themselves remaining respectfully silent in public assemblages." If they listed goals beyond the roles of wife and mother, Oberlin's women students typically aimed to go into teaching or missionary work.
Designed to provide an education that surpassed the best seminaries and academies of the time, the Ladies' Course (also called the "Literary Course") was a four-year curriculum that allowed women and men to be in the classroom together. However, it "omitted the more rigorous subjects" such as advanced mathematics in favor of more coursework in poetry and history. The 1838 catalogue for the Ladies' Course reveals that students were taught "Whately's Logic and Rhetoric" in their second year of study, though their coursework encouraged them to write and not speak their arguments. Graduates of the Ladies' Course earned diplomas, not degrees. Not until 1837 did three women students matriculate to the baccalaureate program. Each of these students — Mary Caroline Rudd, Elizabeth Prall, and Mary Hosford — was also a member of theYoung Ladies' Association. However, even enrollment in the degree-granting program (which had been called the "Gentlemen's" or "Classical Course") did not afford women students the opportunity to perform public orations.
This regulation of women's speech exemplifies feminist rhetorician Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's observation that "quite simply, in nineteenth-century America, femininity and rhetorical action were seen as mutually exclusive. No 'true woman' could be a public persuader." Of course, some U.S. girls and women had actually enjoyed considerably more freedom to learn and perform oratory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Yet the cult of true womanhood, an ideology associated with white, upper and middle class femininity, took hold in the 1820s and was very much alive in the early years of coeducation at Oberlin.
Navigating public activities was particularly vexing for women students at a coeducational religious institution. Oberlin historian and LLS alumna Frances Hosford observes that under this ideology of separate spheres, women who wanted to partake in the benefits of public speech would face opposition on multiple fronts: "the religious called it unscriptural for a woman, the cultured thought it unseemly, the cynical found in it material for their bitter sneers, the evil-minded felt free to make a woman orator the target of vulgarity." Oberlin's women students were, in theory, forbidden from speaking in front of mixed-gender audiences and from speaking in church. In practice, this was difficult to negotiate and enforce. Oberlin's early graduates were therefore governed by access to different degrees of publicity, enforced by subtle and somewhat arbitrary directives on the basis of gender and sex.
Oberlin's commencement ceremony displayed the institution's divided commitments to women's education and feminine propriety. Graduates of the non-degree-granting Literary Course were invited to read their graduation essays aloud, because their ceremony involved, in theory, an audience of other women students. Women graduates of the Classical Course were prohibited from reading their essays because that degree was coeducational, and they would share the stage with men graduates (who were, of course, permitted not only to read their essays, but to give orations). A professor of rhetoric (a man) read the women's essays at the ceremony. In practice, men friends and family members were in the audiences at both commencement exercises, making the strict regulation of women's public speech before mixed audiences difficult and discretionary. For example, this distinction was in place in 1847, when Antoinette Brown was permitted to read her essay, "Original Investigation Necessary to the Right Development of Mind," because she received a diploma from the Literary Course. That same year, her beloved friend Lucy Stone, a graduate of the Classical Course, was asked to hand her essay over to James A. Thome, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Stone refused to write the essay in protest.
Thirty-six years later, Stone finally appeared upon her alma mater's stage as the sole woman invited to give a keynote address at Oberlin College's fiftieth anniversary celebration. By that time, she was an illustrious orator and a distinguished alumna who relished the opportunity to speak publicly in front of a mixed audience at Oberlin. In her speech, "Oberlin and Woman," she praised the institution for its many progressive achievements, claiming that the "highest glory" was in establishing coeducation. However, she made certain to note that Oberlin had done her no favors when it came to cultivating her oratorical skills. Doing some rhetorical finger-wagging of her own, Stone recalled the rigid rules that defined her time at the college, stating, "custom, which held women to silence in public places, sat with the Faculty and with the Ladies' Board, and shook its minatory finger at the daring girls who wanted the discipline of rhetorical exercises and discussions, and to read their own essays at Commencement." During her tenure at the school, Oberlin's debating societies afforded opportunities for the kinds of rhetorical education that Stone desired.
The First Literary Society for U.S. College Women
On July 21, 1835, approximately ten women met in the lower hall of the campus seminary to create a society aimed at the intellectual and moral improvement of its members. Men had organized the Oberlin Lyceum in 1834, though it was active for only two years before participation waned. By contrast, the women's group had a presence on Oberlin's campus from1835 to 1952. In the autumn of 1835 and beyond, meetings for both men's and women's clubs took place in different areas of the newly constructed Ladies' Hall. The men's lyceum occupied an assembly room on the second floor of the building, while the women occupied the attic. The women members scaled several flights of stairs in order to gather in a dark space memorable only for its austerity. The room was long and narrow with a "bare unfinished floor, backless oaken benches, and a lighting system composed of candles." Though they had to converse by the flickering of candlelight, the students did not want for heat in their meeting space. Oberlin's men gifted them a stove, perhaps due to some residual guilt that their fellow students had to climb those extra stairs to gather in a less-than-welcoming (yet undoubtedly treasured) space. With the stove came the need for cleaning up, and the club's vice president was reportedly tasked with maintaining the tidiness of their tiny room.
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Excerpted from "Debating Women"
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Copyright © 2018 Carly S. Woods.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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